


all these memories we make will never change

by carrotstix



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, but there are cuddles, josh has crushes on blonds, sam and beth is more of a background ship, sam and chris join in, the entire group makes an appearance, the washingtons have cute sleepovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 10:14:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5963596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrotstix/pseuds/carrotstix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They have their first big “Washington Lodge Sleep-Over” as kids.<br/>Well, it’s a little bit different than the parties they throw with their friends in their teenage years. It’s only the three of them, the twins having just reached 10 and Josh falling between eleven and twelve. Their parents, having decided they were old enough, informed their children that the two of them would be spending the night in the guest cabin, leaving Josh in charge of his younger sisters before heading out into the snow."<br/>--<br/>The Washington siblings have a series of sleepovers over the years, and eventually they drag Sam and Chris in on the fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all these memories we make will never change

**Author's Note:**

> look i wrote something super cute for once  
> -  
> title taken from 'golden days' by panic! at the disco

They have their first big “Washington Lodge Sleep-Over” as kids.

Well, it’s a little bit different than the parties they throw with their friends in their teenage years. It’s only the three of them, the twins having just reached 10 and Josh falling between eleven and twelve. Their parents, having decided they were old enough, informed their children that the two of them would be spending the night in the guest cabin, leaving Josh in charge of his younger sisters before heading out into the snow.

Josh takes his role as leader very seriously, going around and making sure each of the outer doors are locked and all the windows are closed, and back in the living room he finds his sisters already curled up on the couch in the living room, Disney movie playing on the TV. It distracts him for a moment, eyes caught by Toy Story flashing across the screen, but he shakes his head and turns back to his sisters.

“You guys need to be in bed by a reasonable time,” he says, trying to make his voice sound authoritative.

“Aw, but _Josh!”_ Beth protests, and he’s totally prepared to stand with his decision when Hannah starts to give him puppy dog eyes. She knows it’s his weakness, and he tries to avoid looking, but it’s inevitable. His resolve cracks when her bottom lip pops out.

“Okay, fine, you can stay up late,” he relents, giving a small smile when his sisters cheer. Hannah pats the spot on the couch beside her and he plops down next to her, wrapping himself in the butterfly patterned blanket she hands him.

The three of them are almost halfway through the movie when Beth gives a gasp so sharp Hannah sits up straight so fast she nearly falls off the couch.

“We should have a sleepover!” the younger twin shouts. “In the living room!”

“Yeah!” her sister agrees. “We can stay up really late and fall asleep watching movies!”

“I don’t know…” Josh murmurs, a little hesitant. After all, their parents left him in charge, and the last thing he wants to do is let his sisters get out of control.

“Please?” They both plead in unison. “Please, Josh _please?”_

“Alright,” he sighs.

“Then it’s decided!” Beth cries. “Everybody go get your blankets!”

The twins take off for the stairs, socked feet thumping against the wood. Josh follows quick behind them, nervous that they’ll slip and tumble the whole way down. Even when he gets to his room, he can hear them rustling around and grabbing their own sheets, and as he pulls the blankets from his bed, he can see Beth waddle past his door, comforter draped over her shoulder, blankets and pillows tucked under her arms, Hannah trailing behind with a single blanket in her grasp. Josh nabs the softest blanket from his bed, along with a pair of pillows, one for himself and one for when Hannah inevitably stole the first one.

Josh and Hannah spread their blankets out on the floor, and Beth drops all of her in a lump on the ground, pushing them around until she can curl up inside them like a cat. Josh gets up at the end of every movie to put the next one on, until they’ve all fallen asleep by the end of The Lion King.

They’re all still asleep when their parents come back in the next morning, soft smiles on their faces when they take in the three of their children all still snoring on the living room floor.

//

Their big living room sleepovers become a tradition, allowing their parents to have a night to themselves while the three of them get to have their own little party amongst themselves. It’s two years after their original _“Epic Sleep-Over Party”,_ as Josh had dubbed it, that their mother gives into Hannah’s incessant pleading and allow her to invite Sam to come up to the lodge with them.

Sam’s pretty much a Washington already, and while Josh loves her like a sister (and okay, maybe he has a little crush on her), he can’t help but be a little bummed out. He’s sure that they’re going to kick him out of the sleepover group and declare it an all-girls party.

It hangs over his head for the entire month leading up to their trip, casting a shadow over his excitement far more than it should. He tries not to let himself be bothered about the whole thing, but he has to swallow down the lump in his throat listening to Sam and Hannah giggle from the back of the van, Beth twisting around in his seat to join in on their laughter.

Having Sam around is better than he thought it would be, the blonde melting into his family as if she had been born into it. She gets along with both of their parents and him, too, but he still can’t help but feel like suddenly he’s left on the outside, Sam welcomed into the fold in his place.

The big sleepover comes, of course, his parents declaring him in charge before slipping out the door. Josh holes himself up in his room, preparing to start the XBOX and play video games all night until there’s a knock on the door.

“Come in!” he calls, and Beth’s head appears.

“We’re about to start the first movie,” she says. “And if you don’t hurry up, Hannah’s going to be forcing us all to watch her stupid vampire movie. She’s already got Sammy on her side.”

Josh blanks for a second. “What?”

“We’re about to start the first movie,” she repeats. “And Han is trying-”

“You want me to hang out with you?” he asks, cutting her off.

Beth’s forehead crinkles in confusion as she nods. “Of course,” she replies. “Hurry up, or she’ll put it in before we can stop her!”

He grins, throwing the game controller in his hand down onto the ground as he heads for the door, pulling a blanket from the bed on his way out. He follows Beth down the stairs and nearly cries at the way both Hannah and Sam’s faces light up at the sight of him coming down the stairs.

“Josh!” Hannah pipes up. “We’re watching Twilight!”

“Nope,” he chirps back, dropping his blanket on the floor and sweeping over to the DVD player. “We’re watching Shrek. Executive decision.”

Beth whoops as Hannah protests, and when Sam starts to crack up, they all follow.

When he wakes up the next morning, one of the twins (Beth, as it turns out) has her arms wrapped around his leg, and there’s a foot on his chest to pale to be one of his sister’s. He’s hit with an overwhelming sense of family, lying on the ground with his sisters at his side and Sam thrown in with them.

And, of course, he can’t help but tickle Sam’s feet to wake her, and her resulting squeal makes him laugh hard enough to rouse both his sisters from their sleep.

//

Because Hannah got to bring Sam the year before, Josh reasons with his mother until she allows him to invite Chris along on their next trip.

He doesn’t actually get to go with them until the next year after, so the entire Washington family packs themselves into their van, squeezing Sam between the twins in the very back and allowing Chris and Josh the two single seats in the middle, and thus the great road trip movie war breaks out.

The twins, along with Sam, are fourteen now, and his sisters begin a hardcore campaign to watch Mean Girls as the first movie for their drive. Josh argues back for Transformers, and the debate goes on until everybody is forced to pick between the movies. Josh protests that it’s not fair because it’s two against three, but Chris surprises him by speaking up (in a bit of a meek voice) that he actually wouldn’t mind watching Mean Girls instead.

Beth lets out a victory cry and throws her hand out for Chris to high-five. The blonde stares for a second before a smile breaks out on his face as he smacks his hand against hers.

“Betrayal,” Josh whispers under his breath, and the look on his face shifts to horror as they all laugh at him. By the time he actually gets to play Transformers, nearly everyone has fallen asleep, and halfway through the movie, he looks around to find the only person awake besides him and his father is Sam, sitting in the middle of the backseat with her eyes focused on the screen and a twin asleep on each shoulder,

Chris starts blending into the melting pot almost as easy as Sam had. With Chris’s addition, it becomes more of a group, rather than just “the Washington siblings plus Sam”, and Josh doesn’t really mind all that much.

Their movie war comes back on their sleepover night, and Josh and his sisters end up locked in a debate between Spaceballs and 17 Again. It dissolves into a pillow fight that rages on for a good ten minutes before they notice the title screen for Catch That Kid on the television. Sam and Chris are both huddled by the DVD player, wearing matching grins and high-fiving as Sam reaches out to press play on the player.

“It’s already playing,” the blonde crows, triumphant. “The rules dictate that you can’t change it until the movie is over!”

Josh curses under his breath, because those are the rules: he specifically made that one up last year, and while he’s all up for a teenage rebellion, this is a sacred tradition.

“We have a traitor in our midst, Bethany,” Hannah whispers, voice serious. Josh and his sisters all turn to look at each other, expressions grim, and Beth gives a slight nod.

One of them lets out a battle cry as they charge for the two blonds standing by the TV. Sam is already prepared for an attack, ducking out of the way and running for the pile of pillows on the couch, but Chris is not so lucky. Josh catches him completely off guard with a pillow to the gut, and Chris lets out a muffled “oomph” as he staggers back.

“Defend yourself, Cochise!” Josh hollers, tossing him the extra pillow he’s holding.

The Pillow Wars go on for at least half of Catch That Kid, and by the time they settle down around the living room, they’d all even forgotten it was the reason it had started.

Josh is the last to go to sleep that night, looking up from the screen to see that they’ve all dozed off, Chris lying the couch and the girls sprawled out on the floor. Somehow in her sleep, Hannah had managed to roll away from the other two to the base of the couch, face inches from Chris’s dangling hand, and Beth ended up with her head on Sam’s stomach, the blonde’s arm thrown across her chest.

He smiles, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders and resting his head on the couch’s arm as he dozes off.

//

The next year they go, things get a little different.

Between this trip and the last, Josh ends up confiding in Chris about his crush on Sam, which has been lingering around for the past three years and progressively getting worse. Chris makes some comment about it being like a rom com or something, and Josh tells him that he needs to stop hanging out with Hannah so much.

They make a couple of plans to try and figure out whether or not Sam likes him, or how he would go about seducing her. Most of them are elaborate, impractical, and ineffective, but that doesn’t stop them from filling sheet after sheet of paper with ideas.

Chris decides somewhere along the way that the perfect time to do anything is at their lodge trip, and Josh has to agree with him. They come up with several plans, but they never end up putting them into action. Mostly because Hannah ends up sitting cross-legged on Josh’s bed one day when he and Chris are holed up playing video games on his TV, and when they ask why she’s hanging out with them and not Sam and Beth, her response makes Chris slip off his beanbag chair.

“I found them kissing under the stairs,” she answers.

“Wait, what?” is the first thing that spills from Josh’s lips.

“Yeah, they’re like, practically making out,” she remarks. “They were supposed to be starting the projector in the movie theater.”

Chris and Josh both fall silent, turning around in their seats to stare at her. She falters under both of their gazes, giving a small shrug as she looks back and forth between them.

“What?” she asks.

The two boys turn to each other, locking eyes for a second before stiffening and turning back to the game screen flashing on the TV.

“Nothing,” Chris replies, the three notes his voice goes up betraying him.

Hannah doesn’t call either of them out on it, settling in on the bed and watching them get their asses whipped. When they get the idea to hand her a controller, she wipes the floor with both of them.

They end up camping in the living room that night, and Josh will admit he almost feels nervous about it. He and Chris grab enough pillows and blankets for everyone (not that they’re planning on sharing them, of course) and teeter down the stairs, barely able to see through the blankets they’ve draped over themselves.

Josh claims the couch right away, beaming a pillow at Hannah when she tries to steal it from him. She gives an airy _“thanks!”_ as she grabs his pillow against her chest, but she settles down on the floor without any further protest. Beth whines when she comes downstairs, heaped in bedding of her own and Sam trailing behind her, but she throws herself down onto the floor with her sister. Chris ends up down there with the three girls, despite the recliner going unused beside them.

It doesn’t feel nearly as awkward as he thought it would, but it’s easy to fall back into their normal traditions as Hannah declares it a Disney night and pops Mulan into the DVD player.

They crack jokes and sing along to the entire soundtrack of the first few movies, but by the time they’ve hit their fifth movie, Josh is already out, not the first but definitely not the last.

The next morning he wakes up too early to Chris tripping on his way to the bathroom. The girls are still out on the floor, and he can’t help but smile at the way Beth’s curled against Sam, head on her shoulder and drooling. He already knows the blonde will tease her about it when they wake up, but she won’t really mind, and yeah, Sam is a pretty good match for his sister.

//                                                                                                                                                                             

His favorite of any of their sleepovers is their last.

It’s the 1st of February, and they’re at the lodge for the first time without their parents. It’s not just the three of them, though. Their little group of five has managed to grow over the years. It started with Emily, who began sitting with Josh, Beth, and Sam at lunch to work on a project she had to do with the youngest Washington, and never ended up moving elsewhere. Sure, she was snarky, but she was sarcastic and funny and Beth liked her. With her came Jess, rife with sly smiles and enough sexual jokes to compete with Josh. Ash was next, who Hannah had invited to sit with her and Chris on the days they had lunch together, and she slipped in with the rest. After that, Mike started dating Emily and ended up slotting himself into their group. Matt finally fell in, befriending Chris and Ashley before finally meeting everyone else. Along the way, Josh had managed to get over his little crush on Sam (and if he were being honest with himself, had moved onto another blond).

It was a little weird, in retrospect: a group of juniors and seniors made up of a movie mogul’s three kids, a rock-climbing vegan, a tech nerd, a writer, a 4.0 honor student, the senior class president, a cheerleader, and the school’s star QB. It worked, in a weird way, and after lots of pleading, Josh convinced his parents to let them all make the trip up to the lodge, after the yearly Washington trip, but without parents this time. Their parents tell them all that Josh is in charge and “don’t let anybody get too drunk”, but their mother pulls Hannah aside afterwards and lets her know that she and Sam are the ones who are really in charge.

The first night they get there, most of them are exhausted. Emily, Jess, Mike, Matt and Ashley head right for the guest rooms and pass out, but Josh makes a ‘royal decree’, as he calls it, that the other four have to camp out in the living room with him and watch Star Wars. Nobody really puts up a fight, but there is a near brawl over who gets to sleep where. Sam and Beth perch themselves on the couch and defend themselves from Chris and Josh, who try to take it over instead.

The girls manage to defend their claimed territory, and Hannah takes over the recliner during the fuss, leaving both Chris and Josh to the floor. The eldest Washington pouts, but his whining is forgotten ten minutes into Episode IV. Everyone around him slowly falls asleep, first Sam and then Beth a few minutes later, a heap of snoring, tangled limbs. Chris falls next, slumping against the elbow propping him up before his arm gave out, dropping his head onto his pillow. Both Josh and Hannah make it to Episode III, and he most certainly does _not_ tear up when Padmé dies.

“Hey Josh?” his sister whispers.

“What’s up?”

“What’s college like?”

Josh gives a small shrug she probably can’t see in the darkness of the living room. “It’s okay,” he remarks. “Kind of hard, but I think you’ll do better than me.”

Hannah doesn’t reply right away, and it goes quiet between them before she speaks again. “I’m afraid to grow up.”

An almost sad smile cracks his face. “I know. But it’s not that scary, I promise. We all grow up.”

“Okay,” she murmurs. “Good night, Josh.”

“Night, Han.”

The credits start to roll on screen, and Josh doesn’t get up to put in Episode VI. Instead, he puts his head down and goes to sleep.

//

His youngest sister dies the next day, the next another month later, and they never get to grow up.

**Author's Note:**

> for the record, they are watching star wars in machete order bc chris and josh are nerds  
> find me at: the-cricket-song.tumblr.com


End file.
